I’ve been looking at ways to manage my huge number of photos better (currently around 11 Gig). I’ve been using Gthumb for years now and it’s worked very well and is always getting better. I’ve tinkered around with f-spot recently which shows promise and is already pretty cool.
Gthumb and F-spot have two different approaches. Gthumb works like a conventional file manager, showing your directories and the images in each. Notes, keywords and date metadata can be added on each image. You can add selections of photos from various directories into “albums”.
F-Spot presents you with a flat list of all your photos from all your directories. You can filter the list on date range and keywords. Notes and keyword metadata can be added on each image. F-Spot has a keen emphasis of use of keywords, or tags as is the fashionable parlance.
Gthumb stores metadata in compressed xml files within each directory (in a hidden directory named .comments). This means you can move the folders around outside of Gthumb without upsetting too much, though you will break the Albums which are based on file path. Searches are slow as Gthumb doesn’t index this metadata.
In F-Spot all the metadata is stored in an SQLite database and refers to each image by it’s path. If you move your image files outside of F-spot, the metadata is lost. The central database does allow for much faster searches.
My main problem is my photography web archive. I have a selection of photos online, but in a different directory tree. Gthumb works well with this in the main as the metadata follows the images, but when I update my metadata locally, I have trouble syncing that up online without re-uploading everything. I currently have a set of python scripts that identify images by SHA1 digest and update the metadata. I’m not sure what the solution is to this yet. The easiest is to keep my online and local directory trees the same and use rsync :)
Neither application does exactly what I need. This is when I realised I didn’t know exactly what I need, and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about it and am still gathering my thoughts. For now, I know that I need something in between both Gthumb and F-spot, and then some. F-spot is in it’s infancy so things will change. Obviously, I have the source code to both and can choose to help shape either. As I’ve not decided which is the best approach yet, I’m playing with both code bases. For a start, it would be nice if both could share metadata.
Hi,
can you give me some light about the reusing of gthumb metadata. How can I view the xml’s in .comments dir. My be decompress them but how.
Thank you in advance!
Miro
I’m so sorry
I’ve just saw this: http://johnleach.co.uk/documents/cligs/ and I’m using the metadata.
Thank you very much!
Miro
You can try jbrout, which saves metadata in the picture file itself. On a post I wrote a while ago, one of the developers of f-spot wrote that it has support for saving tags as dc:subjects in xmp metadata, but it’s not turned on yet.
One of the problems I found with jbrout is that it uses IPTC, whereas flickr uses the xmp :(
Another neat tool for picture management is Mapivi http://mapivi.de.vu.
Like jBrout it stores all metadata in the pictures, but it supports all IPTC tags not just the keywords.
It also supports timeline and tag cloud browsing.
Martin